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At the Conservative Political Action Conference, a new group pushed for President Donald Trump to serve an unconstitutional third term.
The effort, called the Third Term Project, is being led by Shane Trejo, who once co-hosted a neo-Nazi adjacent podcast called “Blood Soil and Liberty.” An episode of the now-deleted show was titled “Tanner Flake for Fuhrer,” an homage to a senator’s son who’d posted racist and anti-gay comments under the screen name “n1–erkiller.”
The imagery and language being used by the Third Term Project is transparently authoritarian. The group’s poster at CPAC features Trump in the style of Julius Caesar. Trejo told the independent journalist Ford Fischer on Thursday that the group did so because “Trump is the Caesar figure that America has needed.”
“We’re putting that out there, Trump as Caesar,” Trejo continued. “We think it’s great optics. We love the idea of Trump as our Julius Caesar-type figure.” He also argued that Trump is the “Napoleonic figure that has emerged to lead our country out of perdition and into greatness.”
2) I asked Trejo about Trump as Julius Caesar.
“Trump is the Caesar figure that America has needed” he replied. “Trump is the Napoleonic figure that has emerged to lead our country out of perdition and into greatness.”
“We think it’s great optics!” pic.twitter.com/yaYHqhP6nY
— Ford Fischer (@FordFischer) February 21, 2025
In 2023, I ran into Trejo at an event in Big Rapids, Michigan, while reporting on how the state GOP had been taken over by right-wing grassroots activists. Unlike most people at the event, Trejo declined to be interviewed. I learned afterward that Trejo had hosted the “Blood Soil and Liberty” with Alex Witoslawski, a member of the white nationalist group Identity Evropa.
The Daily Beast reported in 2021 that Trejo and Witoslawski launched the podcast, which is no longer available online, shortly after the 2017 Charlottesville neo-Nazi Unite the Right rally. A description for the podcast stated that it discussed “current events from a consistently uncucked perspective” and that its common targets included “commie trash, losertarians, cuckservatives, thots, tokens, welfare migrants, and the French.”
According to the Daily Beast, Witoslawski wrote an article for the podcast’s website calling for a white “ethnostate” with “an immigration system that virtually excludes non-European immigrants.” He argued that “Most Jews” and members of Black Lives Matter “should be encouraged through government policy to leave the country and resettle in their own ethnostates.”
On its own, the Third Term Project might not be not worth that much notice. It calls itself a “think-tank [sic] devoted to getting President Donald J Trump his rightful third term in office” but mostly seems to be Trejo and a fellow traveler or two. The bigger issue is that Trump has repeatedly floated the possibility of running again in recent weeks. (According to the New York Times, Trump tells his advisers that he is just trying to get attention and annoy Democrats.)
The third term Trejo is pushing is barred by the 22nd Amendment, which states: “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.” To get around that Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) recently introduced a bill to allow Trump to run for a third term. (As I previously reported, the FBI seized Ogles’ phone last year after he admitted to lying about making a $320,000 loan to his 2022 campaign; Trump’s Justice Department abruptly pulled prosecutors off the case one week after Ogles introduced his third term bill in January.)
Ogles’ bill has no chance of becoming law but the Third Term Project does not feel bound by the clear meaning of the 22nd Amendment. The group’s website states that Trump could skirt the amendment by running for vice president in 2028 with the understanding that the presidential candidate would immediately resign the office to Trump upon taking office. “This plan while unorthodox, would show that MAGA cannot be stopped by any procedural rule,” the website states.
On Thursday, at an event to commemorate Black History Month, Trump talked once more about a potential third term. “Should I run again? You tell me,” the president asked. “There’s your controversy right there.”
Even if he was joking, his supporters in the audience didn’t necessarily think so. “Four more years,” they shouted back. “Four more years.”